Various forms of storage systems are used today. These forms include direct attached storage (DAS) network attached storage (NAS) systems, storage area networks (SANs), and others. Network storage systems are commonly used for a variety of purposes, such as providing multiple users with access to shared data, backing up data and others.
A storage system typically includes at least one computing system executing a storage operating system for storing and retrieving data on behalf of one or more client computing systems (“clients”). The storage operating system stores and manages shared data containers in a set of mass storage devices.
Storage systems are being used extensively in virtual environments where a physical resource is time-shared among a plurality of independently operating processor executable virtual machines. Typically, storage space is presented to a virtual machine as a virtual hard disk (VHD) file. A storage drive (for example, C:\) is then presented to a user via a user interface within a virtual machine context. The user can use the storage drive to access storage space to read and write information.
In some instances, a user may be presented with multiple drives within a virtual machine. Each of the multiple drives may represent different replicated copies of storage space including stored files (may also be referred to as data containers). The user however is unaware as to which drive represents which backup/VHD. If the user wants to restore a single data container from one of the presented drives, the user has to manually attempt to determine which drive represents which VHD that may include the single data container. The manual process of correlating the drives with the VHDs can be tedious and time consuming, which is undesirable in today's storage environment where multiple backups are taken for safely replicating information. Therefore, continuous efforts are being made to improve user experience in accessing storage space using virtual machines.